Paul Matteucci, CEO of HearMe.com, has worked in Silicon Valley since the mid-1980s. He spent years studying and managing the workings of computer-hardware companies like Tandem and Adaptec before teaming up in 1996 with Brian Apgar, an engineer, and Brian Moriarty, a game designer, to launch Mpath, a company that let gamers play strategy and shoot'em-up games over the Net. Since then, he's deftly steered the company through a series of big changes that included changing its main line of business from games to voice-enabled chat sites -- the Web's much-more-sophisticated answer to the telephone party line -- and a corresponding name change to Hearme.com. And, naturally, he's taken it through that key Silicon Valley rite of passage for both company and chief executive -- the public offering.

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Computer couture

As we leave the gray depths of the 20th century for the Bondi Blue sky of a radiant future, we'll be thinking really different. Look for beige computer boxes to be replaced by a rainbow of colors, as computer manufacturers partner with candy and cereal makers. Don't be surprised when Dell starts a Froot Loops line and Emachines, furiously looking for the Gen-Y angle, starts selling a Pentium III-powered Starburst line. Big Blue, of course, will launch a new line of ThinkPads in five tangy flavors: blueberry, blueberry, blueberry, blueberry and, yes, blueberry.

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Investors, including a few lucky E-Trade account holders, who got shares at the offering price of $30 a share whooped with joy. Meanwhile, other observers gasped in horror. Stock message boards on discussion sites like Raging Bull and Silicon Investor were filled with posts expressing astonishment that anyone would pay this price for a hardware company with $17 million in sales last year.

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"Going public," circa 1999: Start a company, add a ".com" to the name, sell shares in it to investors who hope to make a quick killing before the Net frenzy ends.

There is hardly an investor who does not profess to believe that the frenzy for Internet stocks is a bubble waiting to burst. Yet the dot-com stock fever continues unabated. In November alone, 40 companies filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission announcing their intention to go public. Most are building their businesses around the Net, or at least claiming to.

Surely, not every firm that can boast of some relationship to the Net deserves a stratospheric valuation. Yahoo's market capitalization -- the total value of its stock -- is now over $80 billion. That's more than Disney -- a huge media conglomerate that owns a television network, movie studios, and, yes, its own Web portal. A share of Yahoo now costs over $300, and for each share Yahoo earned all of
25 cents in its last quarter. That leaves a ridiculous amount of ground for Yahoo to cover before its stock becomes a sensible purchase by any traditional metric.

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Now most of the PC makers are in trouble or worse -- Microworkz and its iToaster are kaput, Enchilada is no longer whole and free-PC pioneer Free-PC is rushing to merge with cheap-PC pioneer eMachines.

So does this mean that the makers of free and super-cheap PCs just didn't do their math? Did their executives wake up one day and think, "Boy, this was a bad idea! Why didn't we just sell computers for $600 like everybody else?"

I'll bet they didn't.

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And yet, while we assume that the computer in the next house is filled with steamy images downloaded through the Net, there's no Bill Gates of online porn. Heck, there isn't even a Hugh Hefner of online porn. The business of selling nude photo spreads is a shadowy one. Few operators of "adult sites" -- as porn sites are called by professional pornographers -- are willing to talk about their business.

Some people involved in the adult industry are so reluctant to speak to the press that they refer calls to their lawyers before they even know what they're about. Cybernet Ventures, the developer of an age verification and payment system called Adult Check, connects reporters directly with the company's general counsel, Tim Umvereit. After he's convinced that you're not under the misimpression that Cybernet Ventures actually operates any porn sites of its own, Umvereit will happily talk to you. But he won't say much, instead descending to good-humored but nearly comic depths of obfuscation.

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The guy got hit in the head with a rock, and has anyone ever felt a trace of sympathy for him? No. The big guy looked like an idiot just getting into the ring with a pipsqueak like David. And let's face it: David had the Lord of Hosts on his side. The fight was rigged.

The story of David and Goliath comes to mind, as it often does, in looking at a domain-name fight between a big guy and a little guy. In this case, the big guy is eToys, an online toy-selling star. The little guy is a group of German pranksters who work under the name "etoy."

What exactly etoy does is, as eToys admits, "difficult to categorize." One site run by the group calls it "the first streetgang on the information superhighway." It has taken responsibility for one high-profile Net prank, and may be associated with a larger umbrella organization of Net artists and rabble-rousers called RTMark. And, more generally, the group's members are dedicated to making fun of corporate mores. I once saw them in San Francisco, at a particularly raucous New Year's party, where they were decked out Devo-like in orange jumpsuits and selling shares of stock in their "art corporation."

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Boy, billions of dollars. Sounds like a heck of a problem, doesn't it? And yet hardly anyone is able to talk about it with a completely straight face. Even one spokeswoman for a company cracking down on personal e-mail use admits to Newsweek that she does some of her clothes shopping at work.

Imagine that Newsweek had run an article about companies cracking down on personal phone use. And imagine that it had been illustrated with copious statistics about how personal use of the phone at work costs employers billions of dollars in lost productivity -- plus, undoubtedly, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of wear and tear on headsets.

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Jan. 17, 2003

Help! The washing machine has crashed and will not give up my socks. When I try to open the door, the screen flashes "Error in scripting routine, line 18637." I see the socks spinning inside. Apparently I have put in a mismatched pair, and the machine doesn't seem to like that. I think I am not the only one who has had trouble. McNealy was on television last night, saying that we could reduce processor load by investing in clothes that we can "wash once, wear many times."

March 12, 2003

Back in the 1990s, there was a joke about Bill Gates that went like this: Q: How many Bills does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. He'd just trademark Darkness and call it an industry standard.

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My little fantasy of having instant access to a compendium of opinion surveys might have been preposterous before the Web, and yet in just a few months we have gotten much closer than we ever previously imagined to my peculiar vision of a plebiscite society.

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FreeRepublic.com reprints the stories with a boilerplate disclaimer that
the works are copyrighted and used under the "fair use" provisions of
copyright law.

Judge Margaret Morrow clearly disagreed with Robinson's contention, and no wonder. There is no "fair use" provision in copyright law that lets you reprint entire articles, no matter how much discussion they are intended to spur. As a writer, I was all set to cheer the decision: The notion that somebody could take my words and simply redistribute them on the Web without my permission or my publishers' was not one that I found appealing.

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Page after page of the document covers in detail the "how" of Microsoft's campaign. Jackson recounts how Microsoft, aiming to make Netscape's Navigator "a jolting experience," essentially sabotaged Netscape software by building incompatibilities into Windows; how Microsoft baited and then threatened computer manufacturers to steer clear of Netscape with promises of cash and threats of cutting off access to Windows; how Microsoft "integrated" its browser with the operating system to make Netscape irrelevant. Reading his account, it is clear that the tortured locutions, bizarre demonstrations and striking lapses of memory that Microsoft executives resorted to through much of the trial availed the defense little.

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Boo isn't exactly a store -- it's more like the Web's first immersive retail environment, a kind of playpen where the credit-card wielding teenagers and childlike adults who seem to be Boo.com's target customers can navigate through a carnival of brand names.

The model is not other Web stores. If anything it's REI, the Seattle sports emporium that famously has an indoor climbing wall, or Disney's chain of whirly-gig happy Discovery Channel stores. This kind of commerce isn't about spending money, it's about having fun. No, scratch that. Boo.com is not just about entertainment. It's about hip, branded entertainment.

I knew before I logged on to Boo.com that actually buying something could be an ordeal. But that was OK with me. I didn't come to buy, I came to shop. My mission: to have hip branded fun. Unfortunately, I think I failed.

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"I must see which way the crowd is headed," Robespierre is reputed to have
said: "For I am their leader."

The story about Robespierre is certainly apocryphal, but it helps in understanding the recent proliferation of books that herald the coming of a new and unprecedented age of prosperity. The Cold War is over, unemployment is low, inflation is lower, the stock market is booming. It's never been easier to see which way popular opinion is headed.

The new manuals of prosperity are the 1990s answer to the dark books of the 1970s and '80s that predicted a permanent oil crisis, the fragmentation of the United States, worldwide starvation and nuclear catastrophe. Just as the pop futurists of that era thought rising oil prices and double-digit inflation were the trumpets announcing the coming of the apocalypse, today's crop of professional and semi-professional seers imagine that the rising stock market is an escalator to the pearly gates of Heaven. So they rush to sing the praises of the new economic order, apparently convinced, like Robespierre, that if they just jump in soon enough they are likely to get credit for leading the parade.

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There are only 10 Internet-ready taxicabs cruising the San Francisco streets, but it seems like there are more because you can see them from halfway across town. They are painted a bright purple with "Yahoo" written across the side in 2-foot yellow letters.

Inside, the front of the cab was a mass of wiring. There was a cable plugged into the cigarette lighter, a multi-outlet cord plugged into the cable, a computer plugged into the cord and a Ricochet wireless modem plugged into a computer. The arrangement does not look sleek, but it does look promising. With so many cables, you rather expect the thing to work.

"Does this have Net access?" I asked the driver.

It did, he said, but he wasn't sure if it worked. I picked up the computer anyway. If you happen to be a computer junkie, as I am, you'll want to know that it's a tiny NEC Mobile Pro unit running Windows CE -- something of a rarity in itself. I pressed a couple of buttons. They made amplified clicks as the screen lit up. The computer warned me that it was low on batteries.

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Last Wednesday, the Dow Jones Newswire ran a story asserting that Microsoft lawyers had been asking for language in recent contracts that would allow the contracts to remain in effect if the company were to be broken up as a result of the ongoing antitrust case.

The story, by Dow Jones writer Mark Boslet, quoted a clause from a Microsoft contract that let it transfer the rights and obligations of the contract to "any successor to its business that results from a reorganization required by court order."

Microsoft objected to virtually every detail of the story. Moreover, Microsoft accused Dow Jones executives of leaking the contract to a Dow Jones reporter while in the middle of negotiating with Microsoft. In a letter to Dow Jones dated Oct. 22, Microsoft chief operating officer Bob Herbold said that the clause was based on a draft contract, that it was proposed by a Dow Jones lawyer and that Microsoft had actually rejected the language.

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The photo frame consists of a small LCD screen surrounded by a granite-colored border, with a protective glass facing. The salesman picks it up and presses a small button cleverly concealed in its side. A control panel flips out.

He presses three or four buttons in quick succession and pulls up a number of small thumbnail images. This is how I am to select the digital photo that will appear in the frame. "Oh yes, I understand," I say, not understanding at all.

And this, the salesman demonstrates, is how I display a slide show of all the images. "Mmmm ..." I say knowingly. Meanwhile I'm thinking to myself, "But it's a $900 picture frame!"

Here, in one small package, are all the sins of the big electronics companies: great technology and beautiful design combined with scant attention to usability or practicality.

Sony's CyberFrame, introduced earlier this year, is one of a range of products intended to showcase the company's new Memory Stick technology. The others include a line of digital cameras and, coming in January, the "Memory Stick Walkman" -- a $400 digital music player that will be able to play MP3 files.

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Do you trust the tip?

I found out about Whispernumber.com from a story on the financial news site CBS Marketwatch. Last week, IBM reported its earnings, and they came in a little above what analysts had forecast, 93 cents a share instead of 90. Marketwatch duly reported that IBM had beaten the analysts' projections, but more intriguing was the report that it had also beaten the "whisper number" of 91 cents a share -- a number that Marketwatch attributed to Whispernumber.com.

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In his preface to "The New New Thing," his new book about Silicon Valley, Lewis calls his tale "an old-fashioned adventure story." He's right, of course (why shouldn't he be? It's his book), but there's more to it than that. "The New New Thing" is an old-fashioned adventure story with the old-fashioned arc of a Bildungsroman -- a biographical novel. The biography is of Jim Clark, a onetime professor of computer science who came to Silicon Valley, started three companies -- Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon -- and became a billionaire. A simpler way of putting it, though, is that "The New New Thing" is the story of how Jim Clark became Silicon Valley's Biggest Swinging Dick.

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